Grant Havers, a professor at Trinity Western University in British Columbia, has written an erudite and thoughtful study of Leo Strauss and the philosophical and political forces he fathered in the new world. As the title promises, Havers examines Strauss’s legacy in the context of Anglo-American democracy. Havers argues that Strauss is not the conservative that writers on the left and right have taken him for, but an honest and avowed friend of liberalism.

Yet Strauss’s turn to the ancients, especially the pagan philosophers of Greece, is a hazard for an Anglo-American democracy built on Christian foundations, Havers contends. The search for timeless truths and natural rights has led to reckless efforts to spread democracy. Strauss’s rejection of historicism and commitment to the universal made him blind to the importance of the English and Christian cultural foundations of Anglo-American democracy.

In any revelatory study, there is always the moment when the reader thinks “That’s true. I should have seen that.” For me, that moment came with Havers’s account—learned, subtle, and occasionally surprising—of Strauss’s liberalism.

Strauss did political theory the great service of enlarging it. He—along with Hannah Arendt, Ernst Kantorowicz, and those with whom they worked and thought—moved the temporal boundaries of political theory. The ancients were no longer a matter for intellectual history alone but teachers whose work lived in the present. The thought of Plato and Aristotle was available to us, thought that we might make our own. Strauss’s canon, far more than Arendt’s, was no longer simply a Western canon but one formed further south and east, with al Farabi and Maimonides. In his remarkable Persecution and the Art of Writing, Strauss argued that the interpretive techniques and sensibility he brought to America came from Judaism and Islam.

When one considers Strauss in the company of those he read and taught, the categories of liberal and conservative seem to recede. Yet Strauss was very much a man of his times, and Havers shows that Strauss’s work reveals a profound commitment to liberalism, even, perhaps especially, in his relation to conservative followers and allies. Havers is an honest and respectful reader. On several occasions he writes, contrasting himself with more interested readers on the right and left, “I take Strauss at his word.” He accepts, indeed insists, that Strauss “sincerely supports liberal democracy in the Anglo-American tradition.” But does that make Strauss, and his “Straussian” followers, liberal rather than conservative?

Havers gives extensive attention to three figures in Anglo-American conservatism: the much venerated Winston Churchill from the mother country, the Canadian philosopher George Grant, and the very American Willmoore Kendall, a Yale don and early contributor to National Review. This is an interesting set. Havers’s studies of Grant and Kendall show the legacy of the American Revolution in high relief: Kendall the “majoritarian democrat” and Grant the latter-day loyalist. Havers also does an excellent job of debunking the Straussian portrait of Churchill as “Anglo-American Greek” and of exploring Churchill’s ambivalence toward the classical tradition. The author might, however, have cast a more critical eye on Churchill’s imperial career, an aspect of Churchill wholly at odds with Burkean conservatism.

Havers himself shares Edmund Burke’s belief that political institutions grow from customs and conventions cultivated through long generations. He also shares Burke’s suspicion of abstract thought and his conviction that any effort to spread Anglo-American institutions where alien customs cannot support them will be futile or corrupting. Havers writes as if the North American continent was simply Albion’s seed, planted alone in an empty land, and held to its English character—if not to the British Empire—by the ties that Burke saw, ties which “though light as air, are strong as links of iron.”

This English America exists in Canada and in the United States, but it does not exist alone. Anglo-American conservatism is not easily bounded, and “Anglo-American conservative” may be as troubled a category as Defoe’s “True-born Englishman.” After all, Benjamin Disraeli, flamboyantly parading his Jewish ancestry and his imperial exoticism, called “Young England” into being.

American conservatives are a still wilder lot, and one might find a place for a “Straussian conservatism” there. The Social Credit populism of the North American plains owes little to Burkean conservatism. The Southern Agrarian love of the land and the local, with its sensuality and sense of stewardship, might cast the pagan and the pantheistic in a more native American light. Russell Kirk’s profound and perverse ghost stories raise difficult ethical questions for a defender of Christianity, even as they affirm the commitment to the ancestral, the traditional, and to Burke. They ally Christianity to a more shadowed American story. In this context, Christianity appears less in accord with American, if not Anglo-American, ideals.

The libertarian current in American and Canadian political thought has no place in Havers’s understanding of conservatism, but it has a firm hold among many North Americans who call themselves conservative. Economistic liberals such as Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, and their allies may not be conservative—Hayek famously refused the label—but they have surely shaped conservatism. In their absence from Havers’s account, Strauss’s defense of liberalism may seem more at odds with Anglo-American conservatism than it should. Recall the claim of Louis Hartz that liberalism is largely uncontested in America, that the belief in rights and republicanism is shared from left to right. If Hartz is correct, the ascendancy of liberalism has nevertheless issued in “a rich interior development,” not least in the range of conservatisms to be found in the North America.

Havers writes from a small and intimate corner of this great continent. If one sees North America as Burke did, seeded by England, shaped by English laws, and devoted to English liberties, the belief that this is true conservatism may be a just one. But Havers’s commitment to the power of history to limit the possibilities of politics and his love (I think this is not too strong) of the ancestral and traditional has consequences for more profound questions than how we think of Strauss or conservatism.

Havers is a faithful Christian, and it is Strauss’s turn from Christianity to the ancients that most troubles him. Havers believes that Christianity is the moral foundation of the Anglo-Americans; without it morality decays and the rule of law, constitutional government, and “the survival of the Anglo-American West” falter. His reading of Strauss suggests that the advocacy of natural rights and ancient and eternal values has made Strauss’s disciples powerful allies of a more openly irreligious secularism. This is an aspect of intellectual history that has yet to be explored, and Havers should be commended for raising it.

The history of 20th-century Europe, however, might give pause to any historian who puts his faith in Christianity as a moral foundation. Havers seems to understand that, after the experience of a silent or complicit Christianity in the rise of the Third Reich, “it is not surprising” that Strauss would “refuse to accept Christianity as a universal faith that ought to inspire all human beings.” Yet he cannot “fully grasp why Strauss is almost silent on the contribution Christianity has made to the Western tradition of political philosophy.” The argument that Strauss and his students give less weight than they ought to the influence of Christianity on Western political thought may have scholarly merit. In the historical context, however, the silence of a German Jewish refugee on the political value of Christianity seems unsurprising.

Strauss emerges from Havers’s study as a man committed to the proposition that the eternal things in philosophy and politics are accessible to the reasoning mind of any person, of any faith and people, in any time or place. Such a conviction lacks the certainty of faith. It is always in question. As Havers recognizes, it can be dangerous: “Strauss and his followers,” he writes, have reinvented Anglo-American democracy “devoted to the spread of universal democratic ideals around the world.” Havers is opposed not only to a democratic evangelism drawn into imperial adventures, but, like Burke, to all claims to universality, abstract ideals, and natural rights.

This might seem to sit uneasily with Christian universalism, but Havers thinks otherwise. Christianity, Havers affirms, is uniquely benevolent and universal. No other religion entails the duty of “loving fatherhood” to divine creation. If the promise of personal redemption is unbounded, however, political redemption is bound within a narrower compass. At the close of his book, he writes, “If the Bible teaches a universal morality that all human beings must practice, it will never logically follow that this morality is historically universal.” The redemptive power of Christianity diminishes here, no longer even large enough to hold the West.

Against this, one can set Leo Strauss’s reading of Judaism: “the patriotism of the prophets is only universalism.” At that moment, Strauss transforms a particularistic faith into one that can embrace the world. Perhaps it has never been simply particular, perhaps there has always been the imperative of tikkun olam, repairing the world. Havers, by contrast, seems to transform historical Christianity into the local and the ancestral.

The idea that the universal morality of Christian teaching is not and will not be historically universal may dismay many Christians. Others may be tempted to read it simply as an affirmation of cultural and religious superiority somewhat lacking in Christian humility. That would be unfortunate. Havers’s study of Strauss and Anglo-American democracy calls on us to question the reach of reason in the service of politics and the redemptive power of revelation.

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13 Responses to Left, Right, and Leo Strauss

What would Leo would say about entitlement reform, tax reform, business subsidies and overseas military adventures? What would he say is the reason(s) for so little being done by the White House and Congress to bring about positive change in these areas? It is infinitely easier to say what should be than to prescribe a course of action to achieve it. Would Leo say (with the combination of capitalism and democracy) this is as good as it gets?

What does Havers mean by “Anglo-American” democracy? English democracy and American democracy are about as different as democracies can be. The UK version has powerful parties, a figurehead head of state in the Queen and a vastly powerful head of government in the Prime Minister, and all real power rests in the House of Commons. America has weaker parties and a much stronger separation of powers, with head of state and head of government combined in the President, and a carefully balanced division of authority between the House and Senate. Doesn’t British democracy resemble Japanese democracy much more than American democracy?

It’s certainly reasonable to say that not all cultures and customs are compatible with democracy; there are tons of countries that have tried it and failed. But I don’t see any evidence at all that Christianity is the main thing you need for democracy (or for “Anglo-American” democracy, whatever that is). Democracy has been adopted and worked very well in non-Christian countries like Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea. It’s worked better in Turkey (less than 1% Christian) than in Lebanon (40% Christian). After World War I, Christian democracies failed all over Europe, displaced by fascism. Democracy was proverbially short-lived in Christian Latin American countries through most of the 20th century.

Maybe Havers addresses these questions in his book, but if so, I’m surprised the review doesn’t mention them.

I will of course have to bone up on the players here. But tying christian redemption to some sort of universal demand demand of obedience as opposed to some condition of that is arrived at by choice and a choice for which there is no tangible punishment if one ceases or joins some other variety of christian thought.

Nor in the modern practice does it have any mechanism by which it is cojoined to the use of force soley for the sake of christian philosophy.
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“Strauss emerges from Havers’s study as a man committed to the proposition that the eternal things in philosophy and politics are accessible to the reasoning mind of any person, of any faith and people, in any time or place. Such a conviction lacks the certainty of faith.”

Even if one wanted to credit the lack of acknowledging christian principle on the position that all of christianity is predicated on myth, or that christian hypocrisy permitted Nazi atrocities, But one can hardly dismiss it’s impact because of that.

And the referenced quotation would lend itself to almost demanding such a critique, at least acknowledging its impact on our ideological, legal and social welfare understanding and structures in western democracy, at least in the US.

It is hard to reconcile Strauss and his penchant for trying to look at everything and everyone through the prism of some sort of philosophical system with conservatism. For conservatism to have any meaning at all — other than being a self-defined philosophy (but whose philosophy is the true conservative one, Calvon Coolidge’s, Robert A. Taft’s, Ronald Reagan’s, or someone else’s?) — it must include a good dose of caution. Before trying to fix something, we must assure ourselves that that something is broken and also that our solution won’t make things worse. It is the liberal who, with the Platonic self-confidence that he knows all the answers, leaps before he looks. Ecce Woodrow Wilson.

Today, if modern American conservatism stands for anything, it stands for the idea that the government should be accountable to the people. Our constitution provides for that sort of accountability through the separation of powers, with each power being accountable to the people through the others, and the people having the power to elect Congress and the President. Without accountability, elections are meaningless: the voter has as much of a choice as the contestant on the old “Let’s Make a Deal” show who had to guess whether to choose the prize behind the door or the curtain without knowing more. Yet to the extent that Strauss is fairly represented by his acolytes as preaching that the public should be shielded from knowing things that the “philosopher-kings” don’t want it to know, his ideals are as reciprocal to conservatism as can be imagined.

This conservative at least remains distrustful of philosopher kings. Historically they have been a disaster. I can’t say I’m an expert with respect to how Marcus Aurelius should be viewed as a philosopher, but one of the most important things he did as an emperor was to allow Commodus (whom he had supposedly trained) to succeed him, an utter disaster as even those who have only seen the movie can tell. The greatest philosopher ever to hold political power, Francis Bacon, compares unfavorably to a rat or a viper as a statesman.

‘Against this, one can set Leo Strauss’s reading of Judaism: “the patriotism of the prophets is only universalism.” At that moment, Strauss transforms a particularistic faith into one that can embrace the world.’

This is bogus! The Strauss quote (to be found in “Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity,” p. 277) is clearly not a statement of his own position, it refers to the position of Hermann Cohen. Strauss always rejected this shallow universalism of the Jewish Left. Mrs. Norton might perhaps read a little bit more carefully.

Perhaps the book under review contains a “revelatory….moment,” which demonstrates Strauss’ “liberalism” (however one defines that term, as it is not defined in the review), but, if so, it is not presented in the review. There, we have a lot of talk about the ancients and some moderns (indeed more so than about Strauss) and various religions and so forth, but I see nothing in the review from which to base a conclusion that Strauss was a liberal (again, in either the “classical” and modern European sense of a “Manchester” liberal, or in the modern American sense of a mild social democrat, an advocate of social and cultural pluralism, etc).

Strauss supposedly believed in “universal” values, but how are we to determine whether those values were really liberal ones? Not all universal values are liberal. And it is not the case that the only alternative to liberalism is some sort of grounded-in-locality-and-history, non ideological, particularist conservatism. There are other, more universalist conservative alternatives to liberalism, and other non conservative universalist alternatives to it as well. Merely being a universalist does not make one a liberal.

Among those who study the ancients, and among those who study western philosophy (among those, that is, with whom I spent my undergraduate and graduate years), Strauss’s portrayal of ancient political philosophy is generally regarded as a deliberately deceptive travesty, one which equates a particular interpretation of Plato with Western thought. The persuasive weight of that particular interpretation depends on denying any development in Plato’s views over the course of his writing, a view which has credibility problems.

Plato, I would say, is the least Greek and most Mid-Eastern of all philosophers, with his emphasis on government by an elite that fabricates and manipulates socially useful myths. (It is one thing to recognize the realities of mass psychology in a practical fashion; it is another to make them fundamental to a theory and an ideology that ignores other, more important, realities.) As to Greek political thought, Plato’s closest ties are with the Pythagoreans, whose system was violently rejected by Greeks in communities where it was tried. The Straussians bring in a few out-of-context bits of Aristotle, to cover the other big name.

Strauss has clearly deceived Havers, and perhaps Norton too, who evokes “the redemptive power of revelation”. Havers was probably quite ready to be deceived, since Christianity appropriated Plato in a fashion similar to the Straussian, when Christianity needed to fabricate an intellectual structure after its initial foundation of revelation and blind faith became outdated.

As to Strauss as a liberal: for those old enough, it should be a matter of personal recollection that, for some decades, it was the flag-waving, cross-brandishing neo-cons who were most explicit about approving Strauss’s political thought. It is indeed the neo-cons whom Strauss (and Plato) most resemble. The left got their belief in systematic deception as a legitimate tool of political action and government not from Strauss, whom they despised, but from the Marxists, who in turn got it from the anti-Enlightenment romantics of the 1800s, who in turn used the intellectual and rhetorical devices made common by Christianity in its “dialogue” with reason.

Strauss’s thought is considered significant not by those who find it credible on historical and intellectual grounds, but by those who find it useful. This is as Strauss intended. If the discoverability of Strauss’s intentions seems to fall short of the ultimate sophistication that Strauss and his followers affect, then so much the worse for their affectations. The implied response that “Hey, it works even if people know the trick is being played” begs the question of how well it can work under those circumstances, especially given the vast increase in literacy and communications since the time of Plato and his medieval followers in political thought. Even recently, the Web has changed the communications environment in ways that were unforeseen in Strauss’s time. (On the level of rhetorical performance, it calls to mind Derrida’s question-begging flim-flam about the need to inscribing textuality within the text, substituting a single superficial literary device for specific attention to the function of a particular text, that device becoming a fetish that, like Strauss’s unconsidered fetishes, fascinated a lot of people who were less sophisticated than they thought they were.)

I doubt that Strauss cared much about the distinction between liberal and conservative, especially in the superficial manner in which that distinction is perceived today, long after Strauss’s death. Strauss’s primary concern was the status of the elites.

As every competent classicist and ancient historian easily learns–and is astounded by–at first glance, Leo Strauss is an utter and complete fraud when it comes to his “study” of ancient texts, and especially Greek. The fact that Strauss is taken seriously–for or against–by anyone is a strong indication of how far gone the modern western perversion that goes by the name of “political science” is. The Europeans for the most part also immediately grasp this fraud. Leave it to United Statesians to fall for anyone with a German accent, no matter how shallow, selling supposedly scholarly analysis. Kissinger is another good example of the same phenomenon.